Working with Archetypes

A few weeks ago I started facilitating two new archetypes groups. In these yearlong groups we explore by using art, poetry, images, and story a different archetype very two weeks. We began the journey by engaging with the archetype of the Fool. Being with this archetype, means letting yourself be in place of 'not knowing'. It also means you are reaching for new possibilities, exploring new experiences and realizing new talents and gifts. Risking change or following the Fool archetype awakens our ability to see. Michael Fox writes; “...to see life again as a child, to see wonder, the awe, the marvel, the simplicity of the blade of grass.” This archetype can open doors that lead to our unrealized hopes and desires. We only have to risk opening the door. Sometimes we have no idea where we are going, in what direction or for how long. But that’s the risk we have to take if we want to become more, see more and understand more of our self.

Working with the Fool Archetype:
How does it feel to take a big risk?
What are some of your fears when you took a risk or started something new?

In your journal:
a) List your beliefs about yourself.
b) What could you risk changing on this list?
c) What would be the cost of taking this risk?
d) What would be the benefit of taking this risk?

Quotes that describe Fool energy:
I live in the space between chaos and shape. I walk the line that continually threatens to lose its tautness under me, dropping me into the dark pit where there is no meaning. At other times the line is so wired that it lights up the soles of my feet, gradually my whole body, until I am my own beacon, and I see then the beauty of newly created worlds, a form that is not random. A new beginning.
Jeanette Winterson

During every really creative act, the artist finds himself homeless. To overcome this state he has to call up his last reserves of strength. This mobilization of all his creative and formal resources, this passionate struggle with the medium, cannot be imitated. It is every man for himself. This explains the magic power of art.
Asger Jorn

Every trip we take deposits us at the same forking of the paths: it can be a shortcut to alienation-removed from our home and distanced from our immediate surroundings, we can afford to be contemptuous of both; or it can be a voyage into renewal, as, leaving our selves and pasts a home and traveling light, we recover our innocence abroad. Abroad, we are all Titans, so bedazzled by strangeness that we comically mistake asses for beauties; but away from home we can also be Mirandas, so new to the world that our blind faith can become a kind of higher sight.
PICO IYER

My old stuff made me sick. In the living world that I’d suddenly discovered, it looked like a rotten corpse that somebody had forgotten to bury. But the new world wouldn’t come to my hand. I couldn’t catch it, that lovely vibrating light, that floating tissue of colour. Not local colour but aerial colour, a sensation of the mind; that maiden vision.
- Joyce Cary

What I most want
is to spring out of this personality,
then to sit apart from that leaping.
I’ve lived too long where I can be reached.
Rumi

Every time a human being makes real progress in consciousness, the whole world for him has changed; relationships change and the outlook on the outer world for him has changed and on his own situation changes. There is complete rebirth of the world.
von Franz